Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Clara Sousa-Silva: A couple of weeks ago, I went to look at climate monitoring data that’s collected from ground-based monitoring stations, including one on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Mauna Loa is the mountain next to Mauna Kea where my telescopes are. We use the Mauna Loa data, which is NOAA Climate Data Record program data, to obtain information about what the sky looks like so that we can remove it from our own data.</p><p>But all the data was gone. So I contacted my colleagues who are climate scientists, who basically do the same work as I do, but instead of doing it on atmospheres beyond Earth, they do it for Earth. They started panicking because lots of data was missing, specifically all the CO₂ data was missing.</p><p>We then learned that there had been some scheduled maintenance of some databases, but even after the databases came back online, there was still stuff missing intermittently. At one point, a lot of the greenhouse gases data was missing. Then they came back, but not CO₂. Then CO₂ came back.</p><p>I contacted my colleagues who use Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, and they reported the same thing — their repositories were not accessible. I found out from my colleagues who work at NOAA that there hadn’t been a centralized effort to safeguard this data, which means the only access people have is through online databases. If those become disconnected, even if the data is not deleted, it basically becomes useless."</p><p><a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/03/climate-data-noaa-musk-doge/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">jacobin.com/2025/03/climate-da</span><span class="invisible">ta-noaa-musk-doge/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Musk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Musk</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DOGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DOGE</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ClimateData" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateData</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ClimateScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateScience</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Astrophysics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Astrophysics</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OpenScience</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Science" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Science</span></a></p>